"Whether or not I voted for President Obama, I was inspired by him. He gave me courage, he gave me hope. I really believed that he would be a positive force for the country," Snowden said.

"And I still hope he will be."

Snowden said Obama has failed to carry through on a pledge to reverse some of the policies of his predecessor.

"He's embraced the policies and he's extended the policies," the former NSA contractor said.

"He's not Bush. He's his own president. But the consonance in the policies should be concerning for a lot of Americans because he was a candidate that promised that he would give the public back its seat at the table of government.

"And he still has time to do so."

For his first American television interview, Snowden met for about five hours last week with Williams at a hotel in Moscow, where Snowden is living in exile while facing U.S. felony charges.

Edward Snowden, in his NBC News exclusive interview with Brian Williams, said that he no longer has the thousands of spying documents he took from the National Security Agency.

“The reality is today, I hold no documents at all,” he said in interview excerpts released Thursday, one day after the extended interview aired in an NBC primetime special.

Snowden told Williams that he wanted the documents out of his hands both because it was a risk to have them in Russia and because it would have gone against his principles to use them for other means.

“Now, I could’ve held on to that and tried to use it to — to threaten the government,” Snowden said. “I could’ve used it to try to sell it or enrich myself. But that would’ve gone against everything that I was trying to do.”

“So the question was, what do I do with it at that point?” he continued. “And the solution that I came up with was to destroy it. To take it out of my hands and entrust it fully to the institutions of the press.”

Snowden said that he did not surrender documents to Russia to win his temporary asylum. He told Williams that he has no connection to the Russian government and has not met Russian President Vladimir Putin, although one analyst questioned that claim.

Getting rid of the documents, Snowden said, was “the best way to make sure that for example the Russians can’t break my fingers and — and compromise information or — or hit me with a bag of money until I give them something was not to have it at all. And the way to do that was by destroying the material that I was holding before I transited through Russia.”

U.S. officials once disputed NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s claim that he had raised questions about the agency’s domestic surveillance programs before he fled the U.S. with thousands of stolen documents, but now confirm that Snowden sent at least one email about the agency’s practices to officials.

In an exclusive interview with NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, Snowden said he had warned the NSA while working as an NSA contractor that he felt the agency was overstepping its bounds.

“I actually did go through channels, and that is documented,” he asserted. “The NSA has records, they have copies of emails right now to their Office of General Counsel, to their oversight and compliance folks, from me raising concerns about the NSA’s interpretations of its legal authorities. … The response more or less, in bureaucratic language, was, ‘You should stop asking questions.’”

“I would say one of my final official acts in government was continuing one of these communications with a legal office. And in fact, I’m so sure that these communications exist that I’ve called on Congress to write a letter to the NSA to verify that they do.“

Just six months ago, the NSA told the Washington Post’s Bart Gellman that no evidence of a paper trail existed. “After extensive investigation, including interviews with his former NSA supervisors and co-workers, we have not found any evidence to support Mr. Snowden's contention that he brought these matters to anyone's attention," said the agency in a statement.

On Thursday, however, White House spokesman Jay Carney said the Snowden email would be made public "later today." It was released a short time later by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Before it was made public, two U.S. officials who had read the email sent by Snowden to the NSA’s Office of General Counsel on April 5, 2013, a month before he stopped working as an NSA contractor, told NBC News the message -- the only email found to date, they say -- questioned agency policies and practices.

Snowden sent the April 2013 email to the NSA’s lawyers while on temporary assignment at NSA headquarters in Ft. Meade, Md.

One U.S. official who had read the email said that in it Snowden asked a question about how the NSA was interpreting its legal justifications for domestic surveillance, and wrote out a hierarchy of U.S. law, with the Constitution at the top. Beneath the Constitution he placed federal statutes, and under them, Defense Department regulations, Office of the Director of National Intelligence regulations, and NSA policy.

Three days later, the NSA’s lawyers responded that he was correct in his analysis of how the NSA justified its collection of domestic data, and said the collection was legal.

The official said that Snowden had asked a question, but had not “raised concerns” about the NSA’s practices.

NBC News has filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act to find out if there are additional documents supporting Snowden's claims, including emails he says he sent to the NSA’s compliance office.

Edward Snowden, in a new claim from his NBC News exclusive interview with Brian Williams, compared the criticism leveled against him to what the Nixon administration said about the release of damaging Vietnam War documents.

Snowden made the claim in an excerpt of the interview released Thursday. The extended interview, his first with an American television network, aired Wednesday in an NBC primetime special.

Snowden compared himself to Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1971 leaked what became known as the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. They showed that the government was systematically misleading the public about U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

The Nixon administration tried to block publication of the papers but lost at the Supreme Court.

“So what’s interesting is that we see the exact same language, the exact same accusations being leveled against whistleblowers, being labeled against any critic of any government program throughout history, throughout time,” Snowden told Williams.

“Daniel Ellsberg got the exact same language leveled against him by the Nixon administration. They said it was going to cause grave damage, that it was irreversible harm, that our national security had been harmed, that he was going to put American lives at risk. But we’ve had so many years, decades since Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers were revealed. And yet none of that came to pass.”

Ellsberg has staunchly defended Snowden. He told HuffPost Live last year that Snowden’s revelations had unmasked “not only the capability of a police state, but certain beginnings of it right now.”

Williams had confronted Snowden with remarks by Keith Alexander, a former director of the National Security Agency, who said that Snowden had done “significant and irreversible damage to the nation.”

Alexander suggested that Snowden had essentially turned over the playbook to the enemy. He said there was “concrete proof that terrorist groups and others are taking action and making changes. And it’s going to make our job tougher.”

Snowden’s response: “I point out Keith Alexander is I would say one of the primary officials most responsible for these abuses. He was personally embarrassed by these revelations.”

In his first American television interview, Edward Snowden defended his disclosure of the American government's use of surveillance programs to spy on its own people, and described himself as a patriot for trying to stop violations of the Constitution.

"I may have lost my ability to travel," Snowden said. "But I've gained the ability to go to sleep at night and to put my head on the pillow and feel comfortable that I've done the right thing even when it was the hard thing. And I'm comfortable with that."

Snowden met for about five hours last week with "NBC Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams at a hotel in Moscow, where Snowden is living in exile while facing U.S. felony charges. An hour-long special program based on the interview aired Wednesday on NBC News at 10 p.m. Eastern and 9 p.m. Central.

Snowden walked out of the NSA with tens of thousands of documents on thumb drives, documents that he says he has released to journalists. These documents disclosed the global reach of U.S. intelligence, including descriptions of government surveillance of U.S. telephone and email records, tapping of undersea fiber-optic cables carrying internet traffic, and accessing Yahoo and Google’s internal user data without either company’s knowledge.

The highlights

In the wide-ranging and provocative interview, Snowden:

Suggested that a deal could be reached with the U.S. government for him to come home, either through a clemency, an amnesty, or an agreement to serve a short prison term. Legal sources tell NBC News that very preliminary conversations have already taken place between Snowden's attorneys and the U.S. government.

Said he had tried to go through channels before leaking documents to journalists, repeatedly raising objections inside the NSA, in writing, to its widespread use of surveillance. But he said he was told, "more or less, in bureaucratic language, 'You should stop asking questions.'" Two U.S. officials confirmed Wednesday that Snowden sent at least one email to the NSA's office of general counsel raising policy and legal questions.

Described his years as a member of the U.S. intelligence community, describing his training as a spy in addition to his technical work as an NSA contractor and CIA employee. U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged to NBC News on Wednesday that Snowden in fact had been a CIA employee, and had passed the routine psychological testing for employees.

Described his arc from enthusiastic supporter of American foreign policy, who enlisted for U.S. Army special operations training during the Iraq War, to a disillusioned intelligence worker who said he came to believe that the government took advantage of the September 11 terror attack to overreach into the private lives of all Americans.

When Williams asked, "Do you see yourself as a patriot," Snowden answered immediately.

"I do," he said. "I think patriot is a word that's -- that's thrown around so much that it can devalued nowadays. But being a patriot doesn't mean prioritizing service to government above all else. Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country, knowing when to protect your Constitution, knowing when to protect your countrymen from the -- the violations of and encroachments of adversaries. And those adversaries don't have to be foreign countries. They can be bad policies. They can be officials who, you know, need a little bit more accountability. They can be mistakes of government and — and simple overreach and — and things that — that should never have been tried, or — or that went wrong."

"Hi, I'm Ed"

The interview was arranged with great secrecy, as Snowden is living in Russia at an undisclosed location under a temporary one-year amnesty from the Russian government. Williams and Snowden met at the upscale Hotel Baltschug Kempinski in central Moscow, near the Kremlin. Snowden was joined there by the first two journalists he reached out to, Glenn Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras.

Snowden received no compensation for the interview, and no topics were off limits. He said he agreed to sit down with NBC because it has published several reports based on the documents he disclosed: "You guys had done -- actual individual reporting on these issues. You broke some of the stories. And they were about controversial issues. So, while I don't know how this is going to show up on TV, I thought it was reasonable that, you know, you guys might give this a fair shake."

Williams said the 30-year-old with a stubbled chin and broken eyeglasses appeared to be both confident and careful. The young man said he avoided the hotel lobby, coming up a back stairway, and showed up at Williams' door by himself with a backpack over his shoulder. He held out his hand and said, "Hi, I'm Ed."

Williams said, "I'd been told he was demonstrably smart in person, and he seems to be just that. He speaks with precision -- and while he admittedly has had months to prepare for this interview and has his own set of talking points, he spoke in a steady cadence, interrupted by an occasional long pause, after which he would often apologize while he gathered his thoughts."

"We are not here to judge whether Edward Snowden deserves life in prison, or clemency," Williams told the NBC audience. "We are here to listen for the first time to why he did what he did, what his concerns were for our society. We are here to learn some of the things our government did in our name. In the end, perhaps some of us will change our minds. If we don't, at least we will have been informed."

A bid for amnesty?

Snowden said he would like to come home, and suggested that a deal could be reached with the U.S. government to eliminate or reduce the charges against him.

"I don't think there's ever been any question," Snowden said, "that I'd like to go home. I mean, I've from day one said that I'm doing this to serve my country. I'm still working for the government. Now, whether amnesty or clemency ever becomes a possibility is not for me to say. That's a debate for the public and the government to decide. But if I could go anywhere in the world, that place would be home."

Attorney General Eric Holder has said that it would be "going too far" for Snowden to receive no punishment, but that the government would discuss a plea deal.

Snowden signaled that he wouldn't accept a deal that included a long prison sentence, which he said would make him a negative example for others in government who see violations of the Constitution and should become whistleblowers. He said he wouldn't say, "I'm going to give myself a parade. ... But neither am I going to walk into a jail cell — to serve as a bad example for other people in government who see something happening, some violation of the Constitution and think they need to say something about it."

He is facing three federal charges, each with a maximum prison sentence of 10 years, and additional counts could be added. In answering a question about whether he thought he had both done wrong and done a public service, he steered the conversation to a "short period" in jail.

"I think the most important idea is to remember that there have been times throughout American history where what is right is not the same as what is legal," Snowden said. "Sometimes to do the right thing, you have to break a law. And the key there is in terms of civil disobedience. You have to make sure that what you're risking, what you're bringing onto yourself does not serve as a detriment to anyone else. It doesn't hurt anybody else. And if you're volunteering yourself to be used as a negative example, if you're volunteering to spend a lifetime in prison rather than to send — spend — a time in prison, a short period where you'll come out, you'll advocate, you'll emerge stronger and be able to inspire other people to resist these policies, are you doing good or are you doing bad?"

But Snowden said he was not interested only in ending his fugitive status, but in making it easier for others to bring to light illegal government activities. "What I would like to see ... would be that we reform whistleblower laws in the United States to cover contractors -- we reform the Espionage Act to distinguish between people who sell secrets to foreign governments for their own gain and people who return information to public hands for the purpose of serving the public interest. If those things can happen, I -- I think overall everybody could be satisfied."

Absent some sort of a deal, Snowden said he would not come home voluntarily to face a criminal trial.

Secretary of State John Kerry challenged Snowden to come back to the United States and face justice. Speaking Wednesday on the Today show, Kerry said, "If Mr. Snowden wants to come back to the United States, we'll have him on a flight today." He said Snowden should "stand up in the United States and make his case to the American people." Later, on MSNBC, Kerry called Snowden a "traitor" and a "coward."

As Williams put the question to him, "You hear often in the United States, 'Why doesn't he come home and face the music?' "

"It's a fair question," Snowden said. "But it's also uninformed, because what has been lain against me are not normal charges. They're extraordinary charges. We've seen more charges under the Espionage Act in the last administration than we have in all other administrations in — in Americans history. The Espionage Act provides — anyone accused of it of no chance to make a public defense. You can't argue to the jury that what you did was in the public interest. You're not even allowed to make that case. They can't hear it. You are not allowed to argue — based on all the evidence in your favor because that evidence may be classified, even if it's exculpatory. And so when people say — "Why don't you go home and face the music?" I say you have to understand that the music is not an open court and a fair trial."

Government overreach after Sept. 11

While September 11 is often cited as a justification of the surveillance programs he has disclosed, Snowden said the government has exploited the terror threat to go beyond its authority. He described his reactions to the terror attack, as a son of a veteran and a grandson of a Coast Guard rear admiral who became a senior official with the FBI.

"I've never told anybody this. No journalist. But I was on Fort Meade on September 11th," he said, as an 18-year-old working for someone who lived on base. "I was right outside the NSA. ... So I remember — I remember the tension that day. I remember hearing on the radio the planes hitting. And I remember thinking my grandfather, who worked for the F.B.I. at the time — was in the Pentagon when the plane hit it. I take the threat of s — terrorism seriously. And I think we all do. And I think it's really disingenuous for — for the government to invoke — and sort of scandalize our memories, to sort of exploit the — the national trauma that we all suffered together and worked so hard to come through to justify programs that have never been shown to keep us safe, but cost us liberties and freedoms that we don't need to give up and our Constitution says we should not give up."

Snowden told Williams of his zeal, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to serve in U.S. Army special forces, how he enlisted in 2004 but washed out of the training program. "I was injured very early on in the program and washed out. And you know, I — I readily admit it. I — I don't hide that... The reality is, as you can see, I'm not — I'm not a well-built guy. ... Perhaps I bit off a little bit more than I can chew on that one."

"But the fact is that I tried. You know, I — I saw what was going on in the world. I believed the government's arguments that we were going to do good things in Iraq, that we were going to free the oppressed. And I wanted to do my part to help share the national burden and create not just a better America, but a better world."

But when he began work in the intelligence services, as he "rose to higher and higher levels in the intelligence communities, I gained more and more access, as I saw more and more classified information, at the highest levels — I realized that so many of the things that were told by the government simply aren't true. Much like the — the arguments about aluminum tubes and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Colin Powell's speech with the vial of anthrax that Saddam was going to — to bring against us. The Iraq War that I signed up for was launched on false premises. The American people were misled."

"Now, whether that was due to bad faith or simply mistakes of intelligence, I can't say for sure. But I can say it shows the problem of putting too much faith in intelligence systems without debating them in public."

Snowden emphasized that he was not contending it was wrong for American intelligence agencies to use all technological means to protect the country from enemies. The problem, he said, was not the tools, but the sloppy selection of targets, the "bulk surveillance, mass surveillance, that actually puts our country at risk for, as far as we've seen so far, no gain at all."

"You know, I don't think anybody who — who's been in the intelligence community for almost a decade as I have been — is really shocked by the specific types of general operations when they're justified. What's more shocking for anybody is not the dirtiness of the business, it's the dirtiness of the targeting. It's the dirtiness of the way these things are being used. It's the lack of respect for the public — because — and the — the — the lack of respect for the intrusiveness of surveillance."

"If we want to be free," Snowden said, "we can't become subject to surveillance. We can't — give away our privacy. We can't give away our rights. We have to be an active party. We have to be an active part of our government. And we have to say — there are some things worth dying for. And I think the country is one of them."

"The definition of a security state is any nation that prioritizes security over all other considerations," Snowden said. "I don't believe the United States is or ever should be a security state."

Using Williams' temporary "burner" cell phone as an example, Snowden said, "The NSA, the Russian Intelligence Service, the Chinese Intelligence Service, any intelligence service in the world that has significant funding and a real technological research team, can own that phone the minute it connects to their network. As soon as you turn it on, it can be theirs. They can turn it into a microphone, they can take pictures from it, they can take the data off of it."

Snowden described how the simple pattern of his phone calls -- not the content of the calls but the time and location of those calls -- could be invaluable to a security service. And how the content of even innocuous Web searches, such as a search for a hockey score, can reveal habits and be used to build a profile of personal information.

"Do you check it when you travel, do you check it when you're just at home? They'd be able to tell something called your "pattern of life." When are you doing these kind of activities? When do you wake up? When do you go to sleep? What other phones are around you when you wake up and go to sleep? Are you with someone who's not your wife? Are you doing something, are you someplace you shouldn't be, according to the government, which is arbitrary, you know — are you engaged in any kind of activities that we disapprove of, even if they aren't technically illegal?"

"And all of these things can raise your level of scrutiny, even if it seems entirely innocent to you. Even if you have nothing to hide. Even if you're doing nothing wrong. These activities can be misconstrued, misinterpreted, and used to harm you as an individual, even without the government having any intent to do you wrong. The problem is that the capabilities themselves are unregulated, uncontrolled, and dangerous."

"All because I Googled the Rangers-Canadiens final score?" Williams asked.

"Exactly," Snowden said.

He described how government analysts use electronic tools to watch a person's computer keystrokes, giving an insight into their thought process. "As you write a message, you know, an analyst at the NSA or any other service out there that's using this kind of attack against people can actually see you write sentences and then backspace over your mistakes and then change the words and then kind of pause and — and — and think about what you wanted to say and then change it. And it's this extraordinary intrusion not just into your communications, your finished messages but your actual drafting process, into the way you think."

Snowden mentioned the U.S. Constitution 22 times in the interview, saying that he believed the expansion of warrantless wiretapping had eviscerated the constitutional prohibition on unreasonable searches.

"The Fourth Amendment as it was written -- no longer exists. ... Now all of our data can be collected without any suspicion of wrongdoing on our part, without any underlying justification. All of your private records, all of your private communications, all of your transactions, all of your associations, who you talk to, who you love, what you buy, what you read -- all of those things can be seized and held by the government and then searched later for any reason, hardly -- without any justification, without any real -- oversight, without any real accountability for those who do wrong. The result is that the Fourth Amendment that was so strict -- that we fought a revolution to put into place -- now no longer has the same meaning that it once did. Now we have -- a system of pervasive pre-criminal surveillance -- where the government wants to watch what you're doing just to see what you're up to, to see what you're thinking even behind closed doors."

Snowden said the government forced him to act. "You know, the Constitution of the United States has been violated on a massive scale. Now, had that not happened, had the government not gone too far and overreached, we wouldn't be in a situation where whistleblowers were necessary. I think it's important to remember that people don't set their lives on fire, they don't say goodbye to their families, actually pack up without saying goodbye to their families, they don't walk away from their, extraordinary -- extraordinarily comfortable lives -- I mean I made a lot of money for a guy with no high school diploma -- and -- and -- and burn down everything they love, for no reason."

Tried to go through channels

Williams asked, "When the president and others have made the point the you should've gone through channels, become a whistleblower and not pursued the route you did, what's your response?"

"I actually did go through channels, and that is documented. The NSA has records, they have copies of emails right now to their office of general counsel, to their oversight and compliance folks from me raising concerns about the NSA's interpretations of it -- legal authorities. Now, I had raised these complaints not just officially in writing through email -- to these offices and -- and these individuals, but to my supervisors, to my colleagues, in more than one office. I did it in Fort Meade. I did it in Hawaii. And many, many of these individuals were shocked by these programs. They had never seen them themselves. And the ones who had, went, 'You know, you're right. These are things that are really concerning. And these aren't things that we should be doing. Maybe we were going too far here. But if you say something about this, they're going to destroy you. Do you know what happens to people who stand up and talk about this?"

"What did you report?" Williams asked. "What was the response?"

"So," Snowden said, "I reported that there were -- real problems with the way the NSA was interpreting its legal authorities. And I went even further in this -- to say that they could be unconstitutional -- that they were sort of abrogating our model of government in a way that empowered presidents to override our statutory laws. And this was made very clear. And the response more or less, in bureaucratic language, was, 'You should stop asking questions.' And these are — these are recent records. I would say one of my final official acts in government was continuing one of these — one of these communications with a legal office. And in fact I'm so sure that these communications exist that I've called on Congress to write a letter to the NSA to — to verify that they do. Write to the office of general counsel and say, "Did Mr. Snowden — ever communicate any concerns about the NSA's interpretation of its legal authorities?"

NBC News did contact the NSA and the CIA, which have declined to comment. Government officials confirmed that Snowden emailed the general counsel's office at the NSA with his concerns. We have filed requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act, and will report on the government responses.

Responsible method of disclosure

Snowden repeatedly characterized his disclosures not as a theft or an act of espionage, but as a public service done in a responsible manner, working through mainstream news organizations, with his insistence that they consult with the government to reduce the risk of harm to individuals. He didn't steal the documents, he said, but gave them to their owners, the American people.

"I didn't want to take information that would — basically be taken and — and thrown out in the press that would cause harm to individuals, that would — that would cause people to die. That would put lives at risk. So a good gauge of what information was provided to the journalists is a representation of what you see in the press. Now the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency and some of these other organizations have claimed that lives are at risk, that all this military information was out there, that — you know, I — I took all this information about missiles and warheads and tanks. But we don't see any of that in the newspaper. You know, we — we — we haven't seen any stories on that. And in fact, even though we've been asking the government for a full year now to cite even a single instance of harm that was caused by this reporting, they've never been able to show it."

He said he attached a condition to the release to protect government employees and sources, requiring the journalists to ask government officials about any harm that particular disclosures could cause.

"This material was returned to public hands, to the institutions of our free press so that trusted journalists and trusted institutions like The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times could make decisions about what within this is truly within the public interest that can be reported in a way that maximizes the public gains without risking any harm."

Not cooperating with Russia

Snowden pre-empted any suggestion that he was in Russia by choice.

With a laugh he said, "All right, so this is — this is a really fair concern. I personally am surprised that — I ended up here. The reality is I never intended to end up in Russia. ... I had a flight booked to Cuba, onwards to Latin America -- and I was s-- stopped because the United States government decided to revoke my passport and trap me in Moscow Airport.... So when people ask, 'Why are you in Russia?' I say, 'Please, ask the State Department.' "

He said he is not cooperating with the Russian government.

"So, I have no relationship with the Russian government at all. I'm -- I've never met the Russian president. I'm not supported by the Russian government. I'm not taking money from the Russian government. I'm not a spy, which is the real question. But I would ask this question, too, you know, I would also be skeptical."

To protect himself from Russian leverage, he said, he didn't bring any of the American documents with him as he traveled. "So the best way to make sure that for example the Russians can't break my fingers and — and compromise information or — or hit me with a bag of money until I give them something was not to have it at all. And the way to do that was by destroying the material that I was holding before I transited through Russia."

Williams asked, "If I gave you a laptop, could you access the documents?"

"No, no," Snowden said with a laugh. "I don't have any control. Let's put it this way. If I'm traveling through Russia, and I know I'm traveling through Russia and I know they've got a very aggressive, very professional service, and I look like Tweety Bird to Sylvester the Cat, if I look like a little walking chicken leg with all these documents — if I've got control over that, that's a very dangerous thing for me."

President Putin's policies

When asked a general question about the declining standing of Russian President Vladimir Putin in world opinion, Snowden gave an answer that was pointedly critical of his host's policies, particularly in regard to freedom of the press.

"It is -- it's really frustrating -- for someone who's working so hard to expand the domain of our rights and our privacy, to end up stuck in a place where those rights are -- are being challenged in ways that I would consider deeply unfair. The -- the recent blogger's registration law in Russia, I -- I can't think of any basis for a law like that, not just in Russia but in any country. ... The government shouldn't be regulating the operations of a free press whether it's NBC or whether it's some blogger in their living room. ... there's so much that needs to be defended here in Russia, but I'm limited by my inability to speak Russian and so on and so forth that it's — it's an isolating and a frustrating thing. And I really hope that — Russia, the United States and many other countries will work to push back against this constantly increasing surveillance, against this constant erosion and abrasion of public rights."

Damage to America's security?

Snowden did not directly dispute the idea that military information was in the documents he handed over to the journalists. But he said no military information has been released by the journalists he has worked with. "I don't think there's anything in any of the documents that would be published by any of these journalists — that would not be in the national interest."

He disputed the suggestion that his disclosures have harmed American defense capabilities. Former NSA Director Keith Alexander said Snowden has done "significant and irreversible damage to the nation." Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified that the Pentagon might need to spend billions to overcome the damage done to military security by Snowden's leaks of intelligence documents.

"If, after a year," Snowden said, "they can't show a single individual who's been harmed in any way by this reporting, is it really so grave? Is it really so serious? And can we really trust those claims without scrutinizing them? I'd argue that we can't. But we should be open to it. It's fair, the possibility exists. And if this has caused some serious harm, I personally would like to know about it."

Snowden sidestepped some of Williams' tough questions. He wouldn't say when he began taking documents. And he wouldn't say how many documents he has disclosed, though he scoffed at the figure of up to 1.7 million documents that former NSA Director Alexander and other government officials have used. He said security at the NSA was so poor that it still doesn't know what's missing. "They have no idea what documents were taken at all. Their auditing was so poor, so negligent, that any private contractor, not even an employee of the government, could walk into the NSA building, take whatever they wanted, and walk out with it, and they would never know. Now, I think that's a problem. And I think that's something that needs to be resolved, and people need to be held to account for."

Having himself removed documents from the NSA and shared them with the press, Snowden urged the intelligence community to tighten its security. "While I brought this information to the free press, has it happened before? Could it happen again? And where are other people going with this? Is there somebody who's going to use this information not for the public good, but for their personal gain? I think these are questions that need to be answered. But I can't do that. That's a question for the intelligence community and the senior officials in charge of it."

He returned to the topic of NSA security with a boast: "While they've lost control of quite a bit of material, the last year has shown that myself and the journalists, we never lost control of a single document."

Snowden expressed remorse for the working people at the NSA, whom he called "good people trying to do hard work for good reasons." He said some observers are too quick to dismiss the NSA's valid role as a defender of the nation. "The problem — that we're confronted with, the — the challenge that — that we are facing is not the working-level guys — you know, some — some moustache-twirling villain who's out to destroy your life. It's the fact that senior officials are investing themselves with powers that they're not entitled to and they're doing it without asking the public for any kind of consent."

"Low-level analyst"

Williams asked Snowden about the government's characterization of him as a low-level systems administrator. Snowden challenged that description, naming his work as a contractor or employee for a series of agencies:

"Well, it's no secret that — the U.S. tends to get more and better intelligence out of computers nowadays than they do out of people. I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover overseas — pretending to work in a job that I'm not — and even being assigned a name that was not mine. ... Now, the government might deny these things, they might frame it in certain ways and say, "Oh well, you know, he's — he's a low level analyst." But what they're trying to do is they're trying to use one position that I've had in a career here or there to distract from the totality of my experience, which is that I've worked for the Central Intelligence Agency undercover overseas, I've worked for the National Security Agency undercover overseas, and I've worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency as a lecturer at the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy where I developed sources and methods for keeping our information and people secure in the most hostile and dangerous environments around the world. So when they say I'm a low-level systems administrator, that I don't know what I'm talking about, I'd say it's somewhat misleading."

In terms of his specific duties as a government employee and as a government contractor for Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton inside NSA centers in Japan and Hawaii, Snowden gave this description:

"So I don't think — anybody should talk themselves up, should rank themselves — but I can speak simply to achievements and what the government thought. The reality is — the government invited me as Dell employee — to have meetings with the C.T.O., the C.I.O., and other high-level — technical officers. Actually, the highest level — executive officers for technology in the entire Central Intelligence Agency. They were asking me to propose solutions, to solve problems that no one else could do. I developed new systems that created new capabilities — that — would protect the NSA from disastrous events around the world. For example, the site in Japan where I worked, I created a system that was then later adopted by — by the headquarters of the National Security Agency, and then rolled out — it's being rolled out now around the world, that would protect them in case any site experienced a disaster. Now this was me, as an individual, who came up with this plan, who pitched this plan — who — who — brought it to the director of the technology directorate, who signed off on it and said this was a good idea, who then said I should really push this back to — a certain internal unit. And to champion it from sort of cradle to the grave, to bring this up from nothing and I was the one, the sole one who did that. At the same time — in a completely different part of work, in — a less constructive and more adversarial position, I was monitoring the activities of foreign adversaries. And they assigned me to watch one of the most elite units of a foreign government — who nobody else could really figure out."

"Is it a large country in Asia beginning with a 'C,' " Williams asked?

"It's better if I don't comment on that," Snowden said.

Snowden spoke of feeling vindication by the twin Pulitzer Prizes for public service, which were awarded in April to two organizations he gave documents to, The Washington Post and the British newspaper The Guardian's U.S. publication. When he was asked about criticism of him by the NSA director, Keith Alexander, Snowden jabbed, "Keith Alexander isn't winning Pulitzer Prizes for public service."

"When you look at the actions that I've taken, when you look at the carefulness of the programs that have been disclosed, when you look at the way this has all been filtered through the most trusted journalistic institutions in America, when you look at the way the government has had a chance to chime in on this and to make their case and when you look at the changes that it's resulted in, we've had the first open federal court to ever review these program declare it likely unconstitutional and Orwellian. ... And now you see Congress agreeing that mass surveillance, bulk collection needs to end.

"With all of these things happening that the government agrees — all the way up to the president again — make us stronger, how can it be said that I did not serve my government? How can it be said that this harmed the country, when all three branches of government have made reforms as a result of it?"

Robert Windrem, Tom Winter and Mike Brunker of NBC News contributed to this report.

In his first American television interview, Edward Snowden defended his disclosure of the American government's use of surveillance programs to spy on its own people, and described himself as a patriot for trying to stop violations of the Constitution.

Snowden met for about five hours last week with "NBC Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams at a hotel in Moscow, where Snowden is living in exile while facing U.S. felony charges. An hour-long special program based on the interview is airing Wednesday on NBC News at 10 p.m. Eastern and 9 p.m. Central.

In the wide-ranging and provocative interview, Snowden suggested that a deal could be reached with the U.S. government for him to come home, said he had tried to go through channels before leaking documents to journalists, and described his transition from enthusiastic supporter of American foreign policy, who enlisted for U.S. Army special operations training during the Iraq War, to a disillusioned intelligence worker who said he came to believe that the government took advantage of the September 11 terror attack to overreach into the private lives of all Americans.

When Williams asked, "Do you see yourself as a patriot?" Snowden answered immediately, "I do."

This story will be updated with full details of the interview, as well as video clips, during the hour-long special.

'Being a Patriot Means Knowing When to Protect Your Country'

Williams: “Do you see yourself as a patriot?”

Snowden: “I do. You know, I — I think patriot is a word that’s — that’s thrown around so much that it can be devalued nowadays. But being a patriot doesn’t mean prioritizing service to government above all else. Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country, knowing when to protect your Constitution, knowing when to protect your countrymen from the — the violations of an — and encroachments of adversaries. And those adversaries don’t have to be foreign countries. They can be bad policies. They can be officials who, you know, need a little bit more accountability. They can be mistakes of government and — and simple overreach and — and things that — that should never have been tried, or — or that went wrong.”

Snowden: 'Sometimes to Do the Right Thing, You Have to Break a Law'

Williams: “In your mind, though, are you blameless? Have you done, as you look at—as you look at this, just a good thing? Have you performed, as you see it, a public service?”

Snowden: “I think it can be both. I think the most important idea is to remember that there have been times throughout history where what is right is not the same as what is legal. Sometimes to do the right thing, you have to break a law. And the key there is in terms of civil disobedience. You have to make sure that what you’re risking, what you’re bringing onto yourself does not serve as a detriment to anyone else.”

Snowden: I Don't Deserve a Parade or Life Sentence

“These are things that no individual should empower themself to — to really decide — you know, ‘I’m gonna give myself a parade.’ But neither am I going to walk into a jail cell — to serve as a bad example for other people in government who see something happening, some violation of the Constitution, and think they need to say something about it.”

Snowden: Feds ‘Have No Idea What Documents Were Taken’

“I will say the 1.7 million documents figure that the intelligence community has been bandying—about—the director of N.S.A. himself, Keith Alexander said just a week ago in the Australian Financial Times, or Australian Financial Review I believe—that they have no idea what documents were taken at all. Their auditing was so poor, so negligent, that any private contractor, not even — an employee of the government, could walk into the N.S.A. building, take whatever they wanted, and walk out with it and they would never know. Now, I think that’s a problem. And I think that’s something that needs to be resolved, and people need to be held to account for, has it happened before? Could it happen again?”

Snowden: Snoops Show Shocking ‘Lack of Respect for the Public'

“You know, I don’t think anybody who — who’s been in the intelligence community for almost a decade as I have been — is really shocked by the specific types of general operations when they’re justified. What’s more shocking for anybody is not the dirtiness of the business, it’s the dirtiness of the targeting. It’s the dirtiness of the way these things are being used. It’s the lack of respect for the public — because — and the — the — lack of respect for the intrusiveness of surveillance.”

Snowden on America: 'There Are Some Things Worth Dying For'

“If we want to be free, we can’t become subject to surveillance. We can’t — give away our privacy. We can’t give away our rights. We have to be an active party. We have to be an active part of our government. And we have to say — there are some things worth dying for. And I think the country is one of them.”

Snowden: ‘I Take the Threat of Terrorism Seriously’

“I’ve never told anybody this. No journalist. But I was on Fort Meade on September 11th. I was right outside the NSA. So I remember — I remember the tension of that day. I remember hearing on the radio the planes hitting. And I remember thinking my grandfather, who worked for the FBI at the time — was in the Pentagon when the plane hit it. I take the threat of s— terrorism seriously. And I think we all do. And I think it’s really disingenuous for — for the government to invoke — and sort of scandalize our memories, to sort of exploit the — the national trauma that we all suffered together and worked so hard to come through to justify programs that have never been shown to keep us safe, but cost us liberties and freedoms that we don’t need to give up and our Constitution says we should not give up.”

Snowden: 'I’ve Never Met the Russian President'

“Right, so I have no relationship with the Russian government at all. I’m — I’ve never met — the Russian president. I’m not supported by the Russian government, I’m not taking money from the Russian government. I’m not a spy, which is the real question.”

June 21, 1983: Edward Joseph Snowden is born in Elizabeth City, N.C. He spends his early life there before moving with his parents, Lonnie, a Coast Guard officer, and Elizabeth, known as Wendy, to Maryland.

1991-1998: Snowden attends public schools in Anne Arundel County, south of Baltimore, before dropping out of high school in his sophomore year.

1999-2001: During this period, the New York Times reports, he developed a fascination with computers and technology and socialized with a tight circle of friends who were similarly enamored of the Internet and Japanese anime culture. He also registered on the Ars Technica website, a hacking and technology forum, and over a two-year period posted as “The One True Hooha” or just “Hooha” about role-playing video games. After his parents’ divorce in 2001, Snowden lived with his mother in Ellicott City, Md.

2002-2004: After attending a local community college off and on, Snowden passes a General Educational Development test to receive a high school equivalency credential. In March 2004, he enlists in an Army Reserve Special Forces training program to “fight to help free people from oppression” in Iraq, he later tells Britain’s Guardian newspaper. But he says he broke his legs in a training accident, and Army records show he was discharged in September. He then lands a job as a security guard at the Center for Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland, which has a close relationship with the National Security Agency, according to the Times.

2006: Snowden is hired by the CIA as a technical/IT expert and receives a top-secret clearance.

2007-2009: Snowden is posted to Geneva, Switzerland, under diplomatic cover as an IT and cyber security expert for the CIA, a position that gives him access to a wide array of classified documents. He later tells the Guardian that during this period he became disillusioned “about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world. I realized that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good."

Late 2009-March 2012: Snowden’s supervisor at the CIA placed a critical assessment of his behavior and work habits in his personnel file and voiced the suspicion that he had tried to “break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access,” the New York Times reports after he is identified as the leaker, quoting two unnamed “senior American officials.” Snowden leaves the CIA soon after his supervisor’s criticism and begins work as a NSA contractor assigned by Dell -- one of 854,000 contractors with top-secret clearance working for the federal government. Over the next several years, he switches between assignments with the NSA and CIA for Dell, including a stint at a NSA facility in Japan that lasts until March 2012.

March 2012: Snowden moves to Hawaii to work at a NSA facility there as a Dell employee. He moves into a blue-and-white house in Waipahu, where he is joined by his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, a 28-year-old performance artist. He donates $250 to the Republican presidential campaign of libertarian Ron Paul, campaign records show, followed by a second contribution of the same amount two months later.

Dec. 1, 2012: Snowden reaches out to Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer and columnist for The Guardian.

March 2013: He seeks a new contractor job with Booz Allen Hamilton at the same NSA facility in Hawaii. He later tells the South China Morning Post that he did so to get additional access to classified documents he intends to leak.

May 2013: Snowden begins sending some documents to Poitras, Greenwald and to Barton Gellman of the Washington Post. He tells his NSA supervisor that he needs to take some time off to undergo treatment for epilepsy, which he was diagnosed with the previous year, according to the Guardian. He tells his girlfriend he will be away for a few weeks, but is vague about the reason.

June 11, 2013: Snowden is fired by Booz Allen Hamilton. In a statement, the company says, “News reports that this individual has claimed to have leaked classified information are shocking, and if accurate, this action represents a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm.”

June 14, 2013: The U.S. Justice Department charges Snowden with theft, “unauthorized communication of national defense information” and “willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person” – the latter two charges violations of the 1917 Espionage Act. The criminal complaint is initially filed under seal in the Eastern District of Virginia, and unsealed a week later.

June 23, 2013: Snowden leaves Hong Kong for Ecuador, with a planned stopover in Russia. But he is stranded at Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow after U.S. authorities rescind his passport. He spends the next month living in limbo in the airport’s transit center.

Aug. 1, 2013: He is granted temporary asylum by Russian authorities as they consider his application for permanent political asylum.

Aug. 1, 2013:The Guardian publishes an article detailing NSA funding for British intelligence because U.K. can collect data that would illegal for NSA to do, based on documents provided by Snowden.

Oct. 2, 2013: At a Senate hearing on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper tells lawmakers that Snowden’s leaks have aided America’s enemies and “done great damage” to its allies. “People’s lives are at risk here because of data that Mr. Snowden purloined,” he says.

Oct. 14, 2013: The Washington Post reports on documents revealing that the NSA collects over 250 million email inbox views and contact lists a year from online services like Yahoo, Gmail and Facebook. The documents, provided by Snowden, show the agency collects the data in bulk from massive fiber optic cables that carry most of the world's telephone and Internet traffic.

Dec. 16, 2013: U.S. District Judge Richard Leon rules that the NSA’s gathering of data on all telephone calls made in the United States appears to violate the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable searches. But Leon, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, puts his ruling on hold to allow the government to appeal.

Dec. 27, 2013: Another federal judge, U.S. District Judge William Pauley III in Manhattan, appointed by former President Bill Clinton, reaches an opposite conclusion, ruling that the NSA’s collection of phone data is legal.

Jan. 17, 2014: In a speech on government mass surveillance revealed by Snowden,President Barack Obama orders Attorney General Eric Holder to study possible reforms of the program. But he also defends NSA employees and attempts to assure Americans they are "not abusing (their) authorities to listen to your private phone calls or read your emails."

Jan. 27, 2014: Based on Snowden documents, NBC News reports that British cyber spies demonstrated a pilot program to their U.S. partners in 2012 in which they were able to monitor YouTube in real time and collect addresses from the billions of videos watched daily, as well as some user information, for analysis. At the time, they were also able to spy on Facebook and Twitter.

Feb. 7, 2014:NBC News reports, based on Snowden documents, that British spies have developed “dirty tricks” for use against nations, hackers, terror groups, suspected criminals and arms dealers that include releasing computer viruses, spying on journalists and diplomats, jamming phones and computers, and using sex to lure targets into “honey traps.”

March 6, 2014: The Pentagon might need to spend billions to overcome the damage done to military security by Snowden's leaks of intelligence documents, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tells members of Congress at a hearing on the defense budget.

March 10, 2014: In a teleconference appearance from Moscow, Snowden tells a crowd at the South by Southwest music and technology festival in Austin, Texas, that the NSA and its counterparts are "setting fire to the future of the Internet," and urges technologists in attendance to “help us fix this.”

April 17, 2014: Snowden appears via webcam on Russian television to ask President Vladimir Putin about whether Russia conducts mass surveillance of civilians. The softball setup — Putin replied with a resounding "no," adding that he is against spying on his people — was generally seen as a PR stunt. But in a subsequent opinion column in The Guardian, Snowden defends his line of questioning and notes that Putin was evasive in his response.

May 21, 2014: NBC News’ Brian Williams interviews Snowden in Moscow. Key pieces of the interview will be broadcast in a one-hour Prime Time special on Wednesday at 10 p.m. Eastern/9 p.m. Central.

Few have vaulted from anonymity to the front pages more spectacularly than Edward Snowden, the former government contractor who revealed secrets from the National Security Agency's spying program.

NBC News will devote an hour of primetime on Wednesday to the first American television interview with Snowden, who disclosed secrets from the National Security Agency. Brian Williams, the anchor and managing editor of "NBC Nightly News," traveled to Moscow last week for an exclusive, wide-ranging interviewwith Snowden. The interview airs Wednesday at 10 p.m. Eastern/9 p.m. Central.

While some call Snowden a traitor who disclosed American secrets, others call him a patriot who exposed violations of the constitution.

Although his intense gaze and stubbled chin became the face of an international debate over privacy and security, many questions remain about his motivations, the exact extent of his removal of documents, and his future.

The impact of Snowden's disclosures, however, is already widespread. President Barack Obama appointed a review panel that criticized the NSA's domestic data collection. Obama recommended in March that the NSA end the warrantless collection in bulk of metadata on Americans, which can show the most intimate details of an individual's life and the patterns of movement and communication of millions. And the House recently passed a bill to end that bulk metadata collection.

Here, in anticipation of Wednesday's special report, is a primer on Snowden's life, his actions, and his impact.

What did he disclose?

Snowden is a former systems administrator for the CIA who later went to work for the private intelligence contractor Dell, first inside a National Security Agency outpost in Japan and then inside an NSA station in Hawaii. In early 2013, he went to work for contractor Booz Allen Hamilton inside the same NSA center in Hawaii.

Among the revelations are the NSA’s bulk collection of phone and internet metadata from U.S. users, spying on the personal communications of foreign leaders including U.S. allies, and the NSA’s ability to tap undersea fiber optic cables and siphon off data.

Based on the Snowden documents, NBC News reported on Jan. 27 that British cyber spies demonstrated a pilot program to their U.S. partners in 2012 in which they were able to monitor YouTube in real time and collect addresses from the billions of videos watched daily, as well as some user information, for analysis. At the time the documents were printed, they were also able to spy on Facebook and Twitter.

NBC News also reported on Feb. 7, based on the documents, that British spies have developed “dirty tricks” for use against nations, hackers, terror groups, suspected criminals and arms dealers that include releasing computer viruses, spying on journalists and diplomats, jamming phones and computers, and using sex to lure targets into “honey traps.” According to the documents, which come from presentations prepped in 2010 and 2012 for NSA cyber spy conferences, the agency’s goal was to “destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt” enemies by “discrediting” them, planting misinformation and shutting down their communications.

What is his background?

Snowden, now 30, was born June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth City, N.C., where he lived with his parents, Lonnie, a Coast Guard officer, and Elizabeth, known as Wendy. The family moved to Maryland in the early 1990s, while he was still in grade school, and his parents divorced. He lived outside Baltimore with his mother, a federal court employee.

Snowden was, by his own admission, not a stellar student. He dropped out of high school in his sophomore year. But by that time, he had developed a fascination with computers and technology and was able to develop considerable skills on his own, and via friends and online forums. After attending a community college off and on, he passed a General Educational Development test in the early 2000s, receiving a high school equivalency credential.

He enlisted in an Army Reserve Special Forces training program in 2004 with the intention of fighting in Iraq to “fight to help free people from oppression,” he latertold Britain’s Guardian newspaper. But he said he broke his legs in a training accident, and Army records show he was discharged after just four months.

He also worked briefly as a security guard before beginning his intelligence work in 2006, when he was hired by the CIA as a computer systems administrator.

How did Snowden gain access to top-secret documents?

Despite being a high-school dropout who eventually received a GED equivalency credential, Snowden was granted top-secret clearance when he was hired by the CIA.

He maintained that clearance during subsequent jobs with CIA and NSA contractors Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton.

Removing the documents was not complicated for someone with his access and expertise, NBC News reported in August. When Snowden stole the crown jewels of the National Security Agency, he didn’t need to use any sophisticated devices or software or go around any computer firewall. All he needed, said multiple intelligence community sources, was a few thumb drives and the willingness to exploit a gaping hole in an antiquated security system to rummage at will through the NSA’s servers and take 20,000 documents without leaving a trace. “It’s 2013 and the NSA is stuck in 2003 technology,” said an intelligence official.

NBC also reported in August that intelligence sources said Snowden accessed some of the secret documents by assuming the electronic identities of top NSA officials. “Every day, they are learning how brilliant [Snowden] was,” said a former U.S. official with knowledge of the case. “This is why you don’t hire brilliant people for jobs like this. You hire smart people. Brilliant people get you in trouble.”

Whom did he give the documents to?

In late 2012, Snowden began to reach out to journalists, and in 2013 he leaked documents to Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, Barton Gellman of The Washington Post, and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras.

The Pulitzer Prize board in April awarded its highest honor, the medal for public service, to The Washington Post and The Guardian for their articles based on the documents provided by Snowden. The award echoed the Pulitzer given in 1972 to The New York Times for its reports on the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam War.

The executive editor of The Washington Post, Martin Baron, said when the Pulitzers were announced, "“Disclosing the massive expansion of the NSA’s surveillance network absolutely was a public service. In constructing a surveillance system of breathtaking scope and intrusiveness, our government also sharply eroded individual privacy. All of this was done in secret, without public debate, and with clear weaknesses in oversight."

Without the disclosures, Baron said, "we never would have known how far this country had shifted away from the rights of the individual in favor of state power. There would have been no public debate about the proper balance between privacy and national security. As even the president has acknowledged, this is a conversation we need to have.”

How much information did he take?

Government officials initially said that it could be up to 200,000 classified NSA documents, and later gave the estimate of 1.7 million. Officials, including NSA Director Keith Alexander, have assured the public that the government knows the scope of the leak.

But Snowden has not said how many documents he took, and NBC News reported in August that officials say the NSA has been unable to determine how many documents he took and what they are.

What was in the documents?

Among the revelations from documents in the Snowden trove are the NSA’s bulk collection of phone and Internet metadata from U.S. users; NSA spying on the personal communications of foreign leaders, including U.S. allies; and the NSA’s ability to tap undersea fiber optic cables and siphon off data.

Did anyone suspect he was taking documents?

Snowden’s CIA supervisor at the CIA during his assignment in Geneva placed a critical assessment of his behavior and work habits in his personnel file and voiced the suspicion that he had tried to “break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access,” the New York Times reported after he was identified as the leaker.

“The supervisor’s cautionary note and the CIA’s suspicions apparently were not forwarded to the NSA or its contractors, and surfaced only after federal investigators began scrutinizing Mr. Snowden’s record once the documents began spilling out,” the newspaper reported, citing unidentified intelligence and law enforcement officials.

And the Wall Street Journal reported in August 2013 that a federal review of his employment at the CIA and the intelligence contractors found the final security check that Snowden underwent in 2011 was inadequate. Investigators “failed to verify Mr. Snowden's account of a past security violation and his work for the CIA, … didn't thoroughly probe an apparent trip to India that he had failed to report, and they didn't get significant information from anyone who knew him beyond his mother and girlfriend,” it said.

Separately, the U.S. Department of Justice has joined a whisteblower’s lawsuit against USIS, the company that vetted Snowden, alleging the company faked 665,000 background checks it conducted for the Office of Personnel Management. It is not clear whether Snowden’s check was among those that, according to the criminal complaint, were fraudulently classified as “complete.” (The case is still pending. The company told NBC News in January that "a small group of individuals" was responsible for the bogus checks and a source said they had been “terminated.”)

What is he charged with?

In a criminal complaint unsealed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on June 21, 2013, the U.S. Justice Department charged Snowden with theft, “unauthorized communication of national defense information” and “willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person.” The latter two charges are violations of the 1917 Espionage Act.

Each of the three charges carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years, for a total of 30 years. Additional counts could be added.

Why did he do it?

Snowden has said in interviews that he acted out of the belief that the spying program was illegal and immoral.

"My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them," he told The Guardian in his first interview.

Snowden also has said he didn’t trust the Obama administration, having seen it prosecute whistleblowers at an unprecedented rate.

Did he have foreign help?

Snowden has denied suggestions that he worked with or for foreign governments. NBC reported in January that law enforcement officials have not found any evidence that Snowden was working for Russia as a spy.

What damage did Snowden’s leaks do to the U.S.?

That is a matter of considerable debate.

The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, has called the Snowden disclosures the most significant leak in U.S. history. "Edward Snowden has done more for our Constitution in terms of the Fourth and First Amendment," Ellsberg said, "than anyone else I know."

Privacy advocates say that Snowden’s revelation of the extensive U.S. spying operations was a bold and necessary step that forced the federal courts, the Congress, and the Obama administration to re-examine the previously secret programs and, in some cases to reform them.

But U.S. officials, members of Congress, and others have said that the Snowden disclosures harmed national security by enabling foreign spies.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said the revelations caused "huge, grave damage" to the nation's intelligence capabilities.

Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified in March that the Pentagon might need to spend billions to overcome the damage done to military security by Snowden's leaks of intelligence documents. Unnamed intelligence officials were quoted by AP saying that the agencies were scrambling to maintain surveillance of terror groups after they changed their methods of communication in the wake of Snowden's revelations.

The officials have not given details of any specific damage caused by the Snowden leaks.

The U.S. was also embarrassed by the disclosures — or by the behavior being disclosed — when the Snowden documents revealed that the U.S. has eavesdropped on the personal communications of foreign leaders, including allies.

Where is he now?

Since August of last year, Snowden has been living at an undisclosed location in Russia, under temporary asylum granted by Russian authorities as they consider his application for permanent political asylum.

What happens next?

His one-year temporary asylum in Russia expires on Aug. 1, but it could be extended if Moscow has not ruled on his request for permanent asylum.

It is also possible – but considered unlikely – that Russia would hand him over to U.S. authorities at that point.

A secret British spy unit created to mount cyber attacks on Britain's enemies has waged war on the hacktivists of Anonymous and LulzSec, according to documents taken from the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden and obtained by NBC News.

The blunt instrument the spy unit used to target hackers, however, also interrupted the web communications of political dissidents who did not engage in any illegal hacking. It may also have shut down websites with no connection to Anonymous.

According to the documents, a division of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British counterpart of the NSA, shut down communications among Anonymous hacktivists by launching a "denial of service" (DDOS) attack - the same technique hackers use to take down bank, retail and government websites - making the British government the first Western government known to have conducted such an attack.

The documents, from a PowerPoint presentation prepared for a 2012 NSA conference called SIGDEV, show that the unit known as the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, or JTRIG, boasted of using the DDOS attack - which it dubbed Rolling Thunder -- and other techniques to scare away 80 percent of the users of Anonymous internet chat rooms.

The existence of JTRIG has never been previously disclosed publicly.

The documents also show that JTRIG infiltrated chat rooms known as IRCs and identified individual hackers who had taken confidential information from websites. In one case JTRIG helped send a hacktivist to prison for stealing data from PayPal, and in another it helped identify hacktivists who attacked government websites.

Intelligence sources familiar with the operation say that the British directed the DDOS attack against IRC chat rooms where they believed criminal hackers were concentrated. Other intelligence sources also noted that in 2011, authorities were alarmed by a rash of attacks on government and corporate websites and were scrambling for means to respond.

"While there must of course be limitations," said Michael Leiter, the former head of the U.S. government's National Counterterrorism Center and now an NBC News analyst, "law enforcement and intelligence officials must be able to pursue individuals who are going far beyond speech and into the realm of breaking the law: defacing and stealing private property that happens to be online."

"No one should be targeted for speech or thoughts, but there is no reason law enforcement officials should unilaterally declare law breakers safe in the online environment," said Leiter.

But critics charge the British government with overkill, noting that many of the individuals targeted were teenagers, and that the agency's assault on communications among hacktivists means the agency infringed the free speech of people never charged with any crime.

"Targeting Anonymous and hacktivists amounts to targeting citizens for expressing their political beliefs," said Gabriella Coleman, an anthropology professor at McGill University and author of an upcoming book about Anonymous. "Some have rallied around the name to engage in digital civil disobedience, but nothing remotely resembling terrorism. The majority of those embrace the idea primarily for ordinary political expression." Coleman estimated that the number of "Anons" engaged in illegal activity was in the dozens, out of a community of thousands.

In addition, according to cyber experts, a DDOS attack against the servers hosting Anonymous chat rooms would also have shut down any other websites hosted by the same servers, and any other servers operated by the same Internet Service Provider (ISP), whether or not they had any connection to Anonymous. It is not known whether any of the servers attacked also hosted other websites, or whether other servers were operated by the same ISPs.

In 2011, members of the loose global collective called Anonymous organized an online campaign called "Operation Payback" targeting the pay service PayPal and several credit card companies. Some hacktivists also targeted U.S. and British government websites, including the FBI, CIA and GCHQ sites. The hacktivists were protesting the prosecution of Chelsea Manning, who took thousands of classified documents from U.S. government computers, and punishing companies that refused to process donations to WikiLeaks, the website that published the Manning documents.

The division of GCHQ known as JTRIG responded to the surge in hacktivism. In another document taken from the NSA by Snowden and obtained by NBC News, a JTRIG official said the unit's mission included computer network attacks, disruption, "Active Covert Internet Operations," and "Covert Technical Operations." Among the methods listed in the document were jamming phones, computers and email accounts and masquerading as an enemy in a "false flag" operation. The same document said GCHQ was increasing its emphasis on using cyber tools to attack adversaries.

In the presentation on hacktivism that was prepared for the 2012 SIGDEV conference, one official working for JTRIG described the techniques the unit used to disrupt the communications of Anonymous and identify individual hacktivists, including some involved in Operation Payback. Called "Pushing the Boundaries and Action Against Hacktivism," the presentation lists Anonymous, Lulzsec and the Syrian Cyber Army among "Hacktivist Groups," says the hacktivists' targets include corporations and governments, and says their techniques include DDOS and data theft.

Under "Hacktivism: Online Covert Action," the presentation refers to "Effects Operations." According to other Snowden documents obtained by NBC News, "Effects" campaigns are offensive operations intended to "destroy" and "disrupt" adversaries.

The presentation gives detailed examples of "humint" (human intelligence) collection from hacktivists known by the on-line names G-Zero, Topiary and p0ke, as well as a fourth whose name NBC News has redacted to protect the hacker's identity. The hacktivists were contacted by GCHQ agents posing as fellow hackers in internet chat rooms. The presentation includes transcripts of instant message conversations between the agents and the hackers in 2011.

"Anyone here have access to a website with at least 10,000+ unique traffic per day?" asks one hacktivist in a transcript taken from a conversation that began in an Operation Payback chat room. An agent responds and claims to have access to a porn website with 27,000 users per day. "Love it," answers the hacktivist. The hackers ask for access to sites with traffic so they can identify users of the site, secretly take over their computers with malware and then use those computers to mount a DDOS attack against a government or commercial website.

A GCHQ agent then has a second conversation with a hacker known as GZero who claims to "work with" the first hacktivist. GZero sends the agent a series of lines of code that are meant to harvest visitors to the agent's site and make their computers part of a "botnet" operation that will attack other computers.

The "outcome," says the presentation, was "charges, arrest, conviction." GZero is revealed to be a British hacker in his early 20s named Edward Pearson, who was prosecuted and sentenced to 26 months in prison for stealing 8 million identities and information from 200,000 PayPal accounts between Jan. 1, 2010 and Aug. 30, 2011. He and his girlfriend were convicted of using stolen credit card identities to purchase take-out food and hotel stays.

In a transcript taken from a second conversation in an Operation Payback chat room, a hacktivist using the name "p0ke" tells another named "Topiary" that he has a list of emails, phone numbers and names of "700 FBI tards."

An agent then begins a conversation with p0ke, asking him about what sites he's accessed. The hacktivist responds that he was able to defeat the security on a U.S. government website, and pulled up credit card information that's attached to congressional and military email addresses.

The agent then asks whether p0ke has looked at a BBC News web article called "Who loves the hacktivists?" and sends him a link to the story.

"Cool huh?" asks the agent, and pOke responds, "ya."

When p0ke clicked on the link, however, JTRIG was able to pull up the IP address of the VPN (virtual private network) the hacktivist was using. The VPN was supposed to protect his identity, but GCHQ either hacked into the network, asked the VPN for the hacker's personal information, or asked law enforcement in the host nation to request the information.

A representative of the VPN told NBC News the company had not provided GCHQ with the hacker's information, but indicated that in past instances it has cooperated with local law enforcement.

In whatever manner the information was retrieved, GCHQ was able to establish p0ke's real name and address, as shown in the presentation slides. (NBC News has redacted the information).

P0ke was never arrested for accessing the government databases, but Topiary, actually an 18-year-old member of Anonymous and LulzSec spokesman from Scotland named Jake Davis, was arrested in July 2011. Davis was arrested soon after LulzSec mounted hack attacks against Congress, the CIA and British law enforcement.

Two weeks before his arrest, the Guardian published an interview with Davis in which he described himself as "an internet denizen with a passion for change." Davis later pled guilty to two DDOS attacks and was sentenced to 24 months in a youth detention center, but was released in June 2013 after five weeks because he had worn an electronic ankle tag and been confined to his home without computer access for 21 months after his arrest. Davis declined comment to NBC News.

In the concluding portion of the JTRIG presentation, the presenters sum up the unit's "Effects on Hacktivism" as part of "Op[eration] Wealth" in the summer of 2011 and apparently emphasize the unit's success against Anonymous, including the DDOS attack. The listed effects include identifying top targets for law enforcement and "Denial of Service on Key Communications outlets."

A slide headlined "DDOS" refers to "initial trial info" from the operation known as "Rolling Thunder." It then quotes from a transcript of a chat room conversation between hacktivists. "Was there any problem with the IRC [chat room] network?" asks one. "I wasn't able to connect the past 30 hours."

"Yeah," responds another. "We're being hit by a syn flood. I didn't know whether to quit last night, because of the DDOS."

The next slide is titled "Information Operations," and says JTRIG uses Facebook, Twitter, email, instant messenger, and Skype to dissuade hacktivists with the message, "DDOS and hacking is illegal, please cease and desist."

The following slide lists the outcome of the operation as "80% of those messaged where (sic) not in the IRC channels 1 month later."

Gabriella Coleman, the author and expert on Anonymous, said she believed the U.K. government had punished a large number of people for the actions of a few. "It is hard to put a number on Anonymous," she said, "but at the time of those events, there were thousands of supporters and probably a dozen or two individuals who were breaking the law."

Said Coleman, "Punishing thousands of people, who are engaging in their democratic right to protest, because a couple people committed vandalism is … an appalling example of overreacting in order to squash dissent."

Jason Healey, a former top White House cyber security official under George W. Bush, called the British government's DDOS attack on Anonymous "silly," and said it was a tactic that should only be used against another nation-state.

He also questioned the time and energy spent chasing teenage hackers.

"This is a slippery slope," said Healey. "It's not what you should be doing. It justifies [Anonymous]. Giving them this much attention justifies them and is demeaning to our side."

In a statement, a GCHQ spokesperson emphasized that the agency operated within the law.

"All of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework," said the statement, "which ensure[s] that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. All of our operational processes rigorously support this position."

Told by NBC News that his on-line alias appeared in the JTRIG presentation, the hacker known as p0ke, a college student in Scandinavia, said he was confused about why he hadn't been confronted by authorities. (NBC News is withholding his name, age and country of residence.)

But p0ke said he had stopped hacking because he'd grown bored with it, and was too busy with his studies. He was never a "hacktivist" anyway, he said. "Politics aren't mah thang," he said in an online interview. "Seriously tho, I had no motive for doing it."

He said that hacking had only satisfied an urge to show off. "Fancy the details for a while," he wrote, "then publish em to enlarge my e-penis."

A British hacktivist known as T-Flow, who was prosecuted for hacking alongside Topiary, told NBC News he had long suspected that the U.K.'s intelligence agencies had used hacker techniques to catch him, since no evidence of how his identity was discovered ever appeared in court documents. T-Flow, whose real name is Mustafa Al-Bassam, pleaded guilty but did not serve time in an adult facility because he was 16 when he was arrested.

"When I was going through the legal process," explained Al-Bassam, "I genuinely felt bad for all those attacks on government organizations I was involved in. But now that I know they partake in the exact same activities, I have no idea what's right and wrong anymore."

Journalist Glenn Greenwald was formerly a columnist at Salon and the Guardian. In late 2012 he was contacted by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who later provided him with thousands of sensitive documents, and he was the first to report on Snowden's documents in June 2013 while on the staff of the Guardian. Greenwald has since reported on the documents with multiple media outlets around the world, and has won several journalism awards for his NSA reporting both in the U.S. and abroad. He is now helping launch, and will write for, a new, non-profit media outlet known as First Look Media that will "encourage, support and empower … independent, adversarial journalists."

The British government can tap into the cables carrying the world’s web traffic at will and spy on what people are doing on some of the world’s most popular social media sites, including YouTube, all without the knowledge or consent of the companies.

Documents taken from the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden and obtained by NBC News detail how British cyber spies demonstrated a pilot program to their U.S. partners in 2012 in which they were able to monitor YouTube in real time and collect addresses from the billions of videos watched daily, as well as some user information, for analysis. At the time the documents were printed, they were also able to spy on Facebook and Twitter.

Called “Psychology A New Kind of SIGDEV" (Signals Development), the presentation includes a section that spells out “Broad real-time monitoring of online activity” of YouTube videos, URLs “liked” on Facebook, and Blogspot/Blogger visits. The monitoring program is called “Squeaky Dolphin.”

Experts told NBC News the documents show the British had to have been either physically able to tap the cables carrying the world’s web traffic or able to use a third party to gain physical access to the massive stream of data, and would be able to extract some key data about specific users as well.

Representatives of Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube, said they hadn’t given the British government permission to access data and were unaware the collection had occurred. A source close to Google who asked not to be identified when discussing company policy said the company was “shocked” to learn the U.K. could have been “grabbing” its data.

One of the people who helped prepare the demonstration was an official from the British signals intelligence agency General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) who worked for a division of the agency called GTE, or Global Telecoms Exploitation. GTE has already been shown in other documents released by Snowden to be tapping fiber optic cables around the world.

In 2013, the Guardian reported that Snowden documents showed GCHQ was able to tap fiber optic cables and store huge amounts of data for 30 days, and that the government was placing intercept probes on transatlantic cables when they landed on British territory. Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported that another Snowden document indicated major telecom firms, including BT, Verizon and Vodafone, were cooperating.

The British cyber spies sometimes share their intercepted raw data and their analyses with their American counterparts. In October, the Washington Post revealed that a Snowden document dated Jan. 9, 2013, described a joint NSA/GCHQ program called MUSCULAR, in which the U.S. and British agencies shared intercepted data from fiber optic cables and copied “entire data flows” from Yahoo and Google.

According to a source knowledgeable about the agency’s operations, the NSA does analysis of social media similar to that in the GCHQ demonstration.

National security experts say that both the U.S. and British operations are within the scope of their respective national laws. When the Washington Post reported on the MUSCULAR program, the NSA said in a statement that it is “focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets only” and that it uses “Attorney General-approved processes to protect the privacy of U.S. persons.”

But privacy experts and former government officials say the lack of disclosure by the intelligence agencies inspires public fear that rights of privacy, free speech and dissent have been infringed.

“Governments have no business knowing which YouTube videos everyone in the world is watching,” said Chris Soghoian, chief technologist for the ACLU. “It’s one thing to spy on a particular person who has done something to warrant a government investigation but governments have no business monitoring the Facebook likes or YouTube views of hundreds of millions of people.”

It might also have a chilling effect on companies like Google. Jason Healey, former White House cyber czar under George W. Bush, says U.S. and British intelligence encroachment on the internet is a threat to everyone, including social media companies.

“We want our security services to be out there and keeping us safe," said Healey, "but we can also look for balance, we can look for limits, especially if we’re putting at risk this most transformative technology since Gutenberg.”

According to the documents obtained by NBC News, intelligence officers from GCHQ gave a demonstration in August 2012 that spelled out to their U.S. colleagues how the agency’s “Squeaky Dolphin” program could collect, analyze and utilize YouTube, Facebook and Blogger data in specific situations in real time.

The demonstration showed that by using tools including a version of commercially available analytic software called Splunk, GCHQ could extract information from the torrent of electronic data that moves across fiber optic cable and display it graphically on a computer dashboard. The presentation showed that analysts could determine which videos were popular among residents of specific cities, but did not provide information on individual social media users.

The presenters gave an example of their real-time monitoring capability, showing the Americans how they pulled trend information from YouTube, Facebook and blog posts on Feb. 13, 2012, in advance of an anti-government protest in Bahrain the following day.

More than a year prior to the demonstration, in a 2012 annual report, members of Parliament had complained that the U.K.’s intelligence agencies had missed the warning signs of the uprisings that became the Arab Spring of 2011, and had expressed the wish to improve “global” intelligence collection.

During the presentation, according to a note on the documents, the presenters noted for their audience that “Squeaky Dolphin” was not intended for spying on specific people and their internet behavior. The note reads, “Not interested in individuals just broad trends!”

But cyber-security experts told NBC News that once the information has been collected, intelligence agencies have the ability to extract some user information as well. In 2010, according to other Snowden documents obtained by NBC News, GCHQ exploited unencrypted data from Twitter to identify specific users around the world and target them with propaganda.

The experts also said that the only way that GCHQ would be able to do real-time analysis of trends would be to tap the cables directly and store the data or use a third party, like a private company, to extract and collect the raw data. As much as 11 percent of global internet bandwidth travels through U.K. internet exchanges, according to Bill Woodcock, president of PCH, a non-profit internet organization that tracks and measures and documents fiber infrastructure around the world.

In the case of the YouTube video information, the surveillance of the unencrypted material was done not only without the knowledge of the public but without the knowledge or permission of Google, the U.S. company that owns the video sharing service.

"We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we have continued to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links,” said a Google spokesperson. “We do not provide any government, including the UK government, with access to our systems. These allegations underscore the urgent need for reform of government surveillance practices."

A source close to Google added that Google was “shocked” because the company had pushed back against British legislation that would have required Google to store its metadata and other information for U.K. government use. The legislation, introduced by Home Secretary Theresa May in 2012, was publicly repudiated by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg in 2013 and has never become law. May hopes to reintroduce a modified version this spring.

“It’s extremely surprising,” said the source, “that while they were pushing for the data via the law, they might have simultaneously been using their capability to grab it anyway.”

Encryption would prevent simple collection of the data by an outside entity like the government. Google has not yet encrypted YouTube or Blogger. Facebook and Twitter have now fully encrypted all their data.

Facebook confirmed to NBC News that while its “like” data was unencrypted, the company never gave it to the U.K. government and was unaware that GCHQ might have been siphoning the data. The company assumes the data was taken somewhere outside its networks and data centers.

“Network security is an important part of the way we protect user information,” said Facebook spokesman Jay Nancarrow, “which is why we finished moving our site traffic to HTTPS by default last year, implemented Perfect Forward Secrecy, and continue to strengthen all aspects of our network.”

GCHQ would not confirm or deny the existence of the Squeaky Dolphin program or anything else connected with this report. The agency declined to answer questions about the scope of its data collection or how it accessed the datastream.

In a statement, a GCHQ spokesperson emphasized that that the agency operated within the law.

“All of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework,” said the statement, “which ensure[s] that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. All of our operational processes rigorously support this position.”

A spokesperson for the NSA said in a statement that the U.S. agency is not interested in “the communications of people who are not valid foreign intelligence targets.”

“Any implication that NSA's foreign intelligence collection is focused on the social media communications of everyday Americans is not true,” said the statement. “We collect only those communications that we are authorized by law to collect for valid foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes – regardless of the technical means used by the targets. Because some data of U.S. persons may at times be incidentally collected in NSA’s lawful foreign intelligence mission, privacy protections for U.S. persons exist across the entire process concerning the use, handling, retention, and dissemination of data.”

The spokesperson also said that working with foreign intelligence services “strengthens the national security of both nations,” but that NSA can’t “use those relationships to circumvent U.S. legal restrictions.”

Both U.S. and British officials assert that while their passive collection of electronic communications might have great breadth, the actual use of the data collected is very targeted, and is dictated by specific missions. Sources familiar with GCHQ operations state firmly that this is the case in each of the agency’s operations.